Unfortunately, this poem is written in a language we don't understand.
Its author is, of course, the Earth herself, through a suite of processes
both familiar and mysterious: river floods, coastal storms, earthquakes,
land slides, and so on. The fundamental goal of our research program is
to help decipher this greatest of all epics. Because the processes that
create strata occur all around us, we can easily see and study them; because
they leave a permanent record only in particular areas and over very long
time scales, we must learn to think about the familiar in new ways.